Thin-Film Superlattice Technology
With broad potential for application as heat pumps and power generators, RTI's new thermoelectric material is both more efficient and faster than existing thermoelectric materials. A thermoelectric module with just one square centimeter of RTI's new material can provide 700 watts of cooling under a nominal temperature gradient.
RTI's material cools so efficiently that applying tiny dots of it to just the hot spots on a microprocessor chip would result in better performance than trying to cool the whole chip and would consume less power.
RTI's superlattice devices are 2.4 times more efficient and 23,000 times faster than existing thermoelectric devices, enabling "anywhere, anytime" cooling. These high-speed, more-efficient solid-state heat pumps represent a step up in the state of the art, using the advantages of microelectronic wafer-scalability, high-performance materials, and high speed. They can be applied to a broad spectrum of technologies, including
- Cooling the next-generation processors, which are increasingly getting too hot to handle
- Enabling efficient and low-cost optical components for realizing the power of large bandwidth optical communication
- Leveraging new capabilities in the world of DNA microarrays and proteomic chips.